Wetmachine site news

NEWSFLASH! West Coast Dilettante David Newsom to join Wetmachine

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Never let it be said that nagging never pays off. For years I’ve been importuning my pal David Newsom, that matinee idol, photographer, award winning movie producer, etc, etc, to start a blog, preferably here on Wetmachine. He’s a great storyteller, as you’ll see shortly, and I’ve been looking for another voice to balance out the glorious wonkery from Harold, Greg, and Howard. I mean, I love FCC policy & sofware geekery as much as the next fellow, but sometimes I think our little wessle lists a bit to starboard, if you will. So I’m delighted to announce that David has tired of telling me to buzz off, and as of this instant is an official wetmachiner.

(David, is it OK that I announce that your new gig is as a producer/reporter for planetgreen? Gee, I sure hope so!)

As soon as our colleague Gary gets his attention back to mundane things, he’ll be setting up a sub-blog for David to be called [notes or dispatches or null] [from a] West Coast Dilettante.

In the meantime, I’m taking the liberty of posting his innagural contribution to Wetmachine main page, which I’ll do sometime later today when I get a sec.

Weekend Update

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Well that was a fun and significant weekend. Gary Gray, (known in some parts as variously Wetmachine’s “quiet Beatle”, Wetmachine’s Cowboy Neal, Wetmachine’s Scotty (“I can no make Wetmachine go any faster, Captain, the di-lithium crystals are already overheated!”), etc, ) got married to the lovely and talented Marcia Levin. As I can attest with some confidence, having been best man.

Good show, old man!

Blogroll Jubilee!

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Noted “reasonable conservative” blogger Jon Swift last year came up with the idea of a “Blogroll Amnesty Day”, sort of a jubilee during which the policy of “put me on your blogroll and I’ll put you on mine”1 would be in effect.

Now he reports that the idea is catching on, and that many blogs will be observing blogroll amnesty days on February 1, 2 & 3. Friends, I’m here to tell you that Wetmachine will be joining the fun too-also, subject to the proviso explained below the fold.

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And counting!

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Harold’s post, below, on the subject of ATT’s being [bleep!], is Wetmachine item #1000.

A while ago I came up with the notion of some kind of fireworks display to mark this momentous milestone, but somehow I never got around to it.

The “Nucleus” software that we use to drive this site assigns item numbers not monotonically, but according to some heuristic I cannot figure out. So Harold’s is not necessarily the 1000th blog entry here. But close enough. Harold, you win the booby prize! Which is a lifetime subscription to the Tales of the Sausage Factory RSS feed! Lucky you!

Parsing website stats is an arcane science art perhaps best done under the influence of burning oak leaves. When your referrer log is populated with pornsite spam, and your top search items are things like “freckled breasts” and “Katrina Witt Naked”, which have been driving dozens, or even hundreds of people to this site each month for years, it’s hard to take the numbers too seriously.

Yet even these rough metrics tell you something. According to my records, when Harold made his first post here, in December, 2002, we got 47 visitors on our biggest day, with an average of 26/day for the month. Lately we’ve been getting about 1100/day.

I’ll check back in with yz when we get to item 2000, s’OK?

2008 Revolutions

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Well, the new year is upon us and I’m already 3 days late with my new year’s revolutions. But I have a good excuse: I got laid off from the OpenLaszlo project on November 16, and so I’ve been very busy with the day job and the holidays. No, wait. I don’t have a day job. I must have been busy with something else. Perhaps I was busy thinking. Or raking the leaves. Or thinking while raking the leaves. Let me check my notes and get back to you on that. Rather, I suppose I should resolve not to bore yzall with formulaic blog posts, so let’s drop the whole subject. I hereby resolve to not resolve.

Resolutions aside, I do have a Wetmachine goal for 2008, and that’s to increase readership by at least a factor of ten over 2007. While leaf-raking, I came up with some startling ideas about how to do that–starting with a free toaster for every single one of you who clicks on a “Read More” link, and including:

* an upgrade of the Bonehead Computer Museum to Croquet 3-D space
* podcasts of my novels as radio plays featuring William Shatner, Kay Parker, and Tom Hulce
* “Bloggers of Wetmachine” swimsuit calendar
* switching to lolcat dialect for all entries about software or writing
* Videoblogging Harold Feld vs Kevin J. Martin in steel cage ultimate boxing match

Stay tuned, as somebody around here said. This is going to be the best year yet, for you, and you, and you! Amen.

P.S. Details on that toaster coming soon.

Second Law Makes Itself Known to Wetmachine

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We had a disk failure, & had to restore from backup. Astute readers may notice that we’ve lost a few days’ worth of posts.

Not sure if we’ll be able to do anything about that (I’m on the road for the next few days. . .). In the meantime, wetmechanics are welcome to repost from their own personal archives, if they care to do so. . .

We apologize for the horrible discontinuity.

I've been spamtrapped!

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I was just trying to add a comment to Harold’s blog entry, below, when the screen suddenly went a horrible blue, and a (probably illegally used, copyrightwise) image of a can of Spam(tm) appeared, along with this message:


You’ve been spamtrapped

we will not tolerate spam Als u menselijk bent en u denkt dat u onterecht wordt beschuldigd van spam activiteiten op mijn weblog, ga dan terug naar de vorige pagina. Mogelijkerwijs bevat uw commentaar een link naar een site welke ik op dit weblog weer. Ook kan het gebruik van verschillende woorden zoals casino u naar deze pagina hebben geleid.
English

If you are human and you think that you are wrongly beeing accused of trying to spam my blog, please return to the previous page by going back. You’ve been sent here because the original comment contains illegal keywords like casino or links to spamming websites. I will not tolerate these links on my weblog and as a precaution all content is filtered before submitted to the site.

What’s particularly galling this remark is the sentence, “I will not tolerate these links on my weblog:” WTF? Hey, it’s MY GODDAMN WEBLOG, YOU STUPID PIECE OF SOFTWARE! WHO THE BLEEP DO YOU THINK YOU ARE????

Anyway, over the last few weeks we have recieved some email from friends of the site to the effect that they had been prevented from making comments. I put that on my list of things to worry about at some time in the future. Now that it has happened to me & I have experienced first hand just how irritating and insulting it is, let me just say that this problem has gotten my attention for real. I cannot promise how soon we’ll get it resolved, but it will probably be sooner than if I had not been spamptrapped. In the meantime, any of you who have been impoperly spamtrapped, please accept my apology on behalf of my well-meaning but incompetent and rude spam blocker.

By the way, here’s my comment on Harold’s blog entry (below the fold):

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Greg Rose and the evolution of a wet machine

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Sometime right soon, Dr. Gregory Rose, he of the brilliant fisking of the spectrum auction scam, will be making his inaugural post at his new Wetmachine blog Econoklastic. So may I be the first to welcome him: Welcome, Greg! Welcome to Wetmachine! I have no idea what he’ll write about, but his background leads me to expect good things. Greg describes himself thusly:

I’ve been an academic economist for more than 20 years. My
dissertation was on developing mathematical techniques for aggregating
affective variables in utility functions. I left OSU Tulsa to come to
DC in 2004 to set up a consulting company. I’ve been doing consulting
for the public interest community on telecoms ever since. And I’m a
very unconventional economist: I’m probably the only socialist member
of the Public Choice Society.

Adding another name to the Wetmachine masthead seems as good an occasion as any to launch into some meditative malarky I’ve been cogitating on for some while about where Wetmachine came from, has been, and is tending. Especially since the one-two combination punch of Harold Feld and Greg Rose should pretty much establish Wetmachine as a premiere telecommunication/first amendment/innaleckshul property policy wonk “destination shopping” blog. Which is kind of cool, especially since it’s nothing like what I set out to create when I launched Wetmachine seven years ago. At that time I was mostly trying to pimp my books (still am), and I also was pretty irritated by the technological utopianism of blogs like Slashdot and Boing Boing & I wanted to do something in the same basic zip code as those blogs but much more curmudgeonly and technoskeptical. Sort of a blend of Slashdot and Boing Boing on a bad acid trip by way of the Unabomber Manifesto was what I had in mind. I also imagined that that the now-atrophied Bonehead Computer Museum would evolve into the central attraction of the site. Guess I missed that guess. I had no idea when I invited Harold Feld to blog with me that I was snagging a world-class policy expert with a major talent for snark, nor did I know that Howard Stearns would emerge up to his eyeballs in Croquet at the head of the Web 3.0 movement. Much to my astonishment, and with little help from me, Wetmachine has become of blog of substance (by some definition of “substance”.) Who woulda thunk it? Any of y’all as may be interested in some more of my navel-gazing, feel free to follow me below the fold.

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Kosmic Karma Waves & update

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I keep a kind of random, desultory diary on a place called HuSi, “Hulver’s Site”. This is where I put more personal stuff and things I deem “not in keeping with the spirit of Wetmachine”, however nebulously defined that concept may be.

Recently I posted a diary entry on Husi, a reminiscence from nearly thirty years ago, that includes some of my own kosmik karmik philosophy. Or if not philosophy, at least data points. The story, which is true, is mildly pornographic, so if you don’t like that kind of thing, don’t click the link. Anyway I like it, so maybe you will too.

In the “update” department, I hope to soon undertake a few improvements to this site. I’ll post a few more chapters from “The Pains,” and I’ll make it easier to find, read, and order my books. There will be better, and easier to find, information about each of the primary wetmachiners, (me, Harold, Howard and Gary) and perhaps some more “Web 2.0” style goodness. If you have any suggestions or requests, please pass them on, either in the comments or in mail to “mail” at this website.